Lxpanel question and wallpaper question

I'm trying to change the appearance of lxpanel and so far most things worked. However there are 3 things of which I don't know they can be done:
* first, the "applications" text on the panel and the "start button": is the applications text part of the start button ? I don't seem to be able to change the color. Also, where is this button image located ? I looked at /home/tux/.config/lxpanel and at /usr/share/ but wasn't able to find it.
* I'm also unable to change the color of the volume control button; I haven't found the volume control button logo neither
* finally, removing apps from the panel doesn't work; clicking "remove" doesn't do anything

Another thing: I'm unable to get any wallpaper to work. Regardless of the wallpaper I use it comes up as just black (even when converted to jpg using the GIMP). What's the proper resolution to use (or is that of no importance) and what's the accepted file format (does png work, does it need to be jpeg or jpg ?), and is transparency allowed ? My idea is to use a transparent background so that people can select an own background color from the pcmanfm background menu, hence being able to switch colors more often. Also, a plain single color also works better for readability since the idea is to also use conky.

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I don't have full answers but here are some hints:
* menu is defined in applications.menu (under /etc/xdg)
* the volume thing is an lxpanel applet/plugin, so its config is probably not specific to SliTaz
* probably abnormal, but you can still edit the panel config file under .config/lxpanel/(profile)/panels/

I set the wallpaper via PCManFM's menu. That works, it's just the file itself that doesn't seem to be showing correctly. It might be a format thing (ie in that I need to put the wallpaper in a different format, or that transparency just doesn't work, ...)

Not sure, but maybe PCManFM sets a background color only if no wallpaper image is provided.
Given that PCManFM (and SpaceFM) are overlaying a window on top of the X root window, the black you see would then be a black X root window. To test, you could try to set the X root window to some color (I don't know how, maybe a setting in ~/.Xresources, or somewhere under /etc/X11).

I found the volume button on the lxpanel; appearantly it's a set of images located at /usr/share/icons/SliTaz/status/32 I found them by looking at the images in the "icon browser" program. I made new images for the set, in color 222222 (black). Put it in my package and should work.

As for the applications text: this did change into a black font, but not directly; rather it required a restart of the panel.

for the icon themes: I just changed the (sound) icons of just the panel, not the other ones, so changing the entire theme seems a bit overkill (the background wallpaper is rather dark anyway, so keeping the icon theme might even work better)

I have one last question for the lxpanel package I'm working on:
how can I delete the spider mouse cursor when dragging windows, and make the top window border darker ? That's going to be better when dragging windows. I need to know the location of the file gtkappearance alters (so I won't do it with the gtk appearance user interface/program). Also, perhaps the lines to alter in the file could be of help.

Windows are not managed by the panel, but by the window manager (obviously). If you're using the default, namely Openbox, the user config is in ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml . It refers to a theme, described in a "themerc" file, under /usr/share/themes; users can put their own themes under ~/.themes.

Since long I've been using a script that not only changes the wallpaper but also the color, font color, transparency, alpha etc. of LXPanel to match the wp. It's been working well in SliTaz 3.0 but I haven't had the time yet to make it work in 5.0. The code is also a bit dirty because it calls itself and it's got a nasty way of killing and restarting both PCManFM and LXPanel, as proper restart functions were not available in these early versions of the programs (2009). Still, let me know if you're interested. Maybe I can dump it somewhere together with the three needed configuration files ...

@Darjeeling
it may be best to update the script (and possibly convert your script into a package) yourself and sent it to pankso. You can sent it to him as a script too (not a package) and ask him to implement it into the main slitaz version.
I'm going to send my packages too to him/association Slitaz, once completed.
The script won't be much use to my particilar packages though, since I only need a few things to be altered, and not have it match the theme to the wallpaper.

I made some progress on the spider mouse cursor when dragging windows issue and how to make the top window border darker. After reading forum.slitaz.org/topic/theming-slitaz, it became clear I need to either remove a file in /usr/share/slitaz-polar/cursors/ or overwrite a file (for example with a copy of a different cursor, which I then just copy and rename). The problem is that none of these have the name "spider", so I don't know which file it is exactly that is the spider cursor. The cursor occurs when dragging windows, but similarly, there's no file named "windowdrag" or something. Can someone tell me how to determine which file it is ? None of the files are openable with a conventional program (like leafpad, ...)

As for the making the top window border darker: I used gcolor2 to determine which color the window border had (it was #ededed) and then I looked for this in the file in /usr/share/themes/SliTaz/openbox-3/, and changed it to #8c8c8c . I haven't tried it yet, but I assume that'll work.

Let me know how to determine what file I need to delete/overwrite for the spider cursor; once I know this I can make a "semi-ready package" and post it at my sourceforge project site.

Also, can you inform me of one other thing ? I tried the command "pcmanfm --set-wallpaper= " to remove the current wallpaper by setting it to nothing. That didn't work; the error returned was "desktop manager not active". I'm not sure how to remove the wallpaper by command line, and need to know this before being able to use xsetroot as the wallpaper handler. I don't quite get how it is that pcmanfm isn't active as the wallpaper manager in the first place, I kept the standard settings of slitaz 5, and this is showing the slitaz 5 wallpaper.

I downloaded the source and examined the files, yet couldn't determine the file to change from that (filenames between source and the compiled files in slitaz don't match; ie in the source the spider image was "SizeAll", but that wasn't present in the folder with the compiled files).
I just added commands in the script instead to remove slitaz-polar and install aero instead, and also added in an updated .Xdefaults file in the /fs/home/tux/ folder of the package.
I removed the pcmanfm command and left everything as it is (normally the pcmanfm program isn't running at all, so no need to kill it).